Tuesday, March 8, 2016

True stories?

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in February 2003)

The
common view – and I’ve pushed it as much as anyone – is that Hollywood doesn’t
take on the same range of material it did thirty years ago, but it could be
much much worse. This Christmas season, with About Schmidt and The Hours
and Chicago and Gangs of New York, we certainly had diversity, and not a little
quality. And on New Year’s Eve, they were joined by perhaps the most marginal
project of all: Confessions of a
Dangerous Mind, adapted from the autobiography of Chuck Barris, who created
TV shows like The Dating Game and The Gong Show.

Chuck Barris

If you
think trash culture put the Western world on the slow road to hell, Barris must
resemble the devil incarnate. As the movie presents it, his sole motive was to
be rich and get laid – no thought for art or quality or taste. His talent was
for coming up with easy-to-grasp gimmicks and then for socking them to the
audience with a cotton-candy irresistibility that kept you watching, no matter
how much you knew it was bad for you. His heyday was in the 60’s and 70’s – by
the more ironic, savvy 80’s, he was basically a has-been.

He then
wrote Confessions, in which he
claimed that throughout his career as a TV producer, he’d also been working as
an undercover CIA assassin, and had killed more than 30 people. I haven’t read
the book, and don’t know how convincing it seemed to anyone, but presumably it
was all just a fantasy, or an exercise in conceptual humour. The film version
is directed – his first movie as such – by George Clooney, who also plays a
supporting role as the CIA agent who recruits Barris. Barris is played by Sam
Rockwell, who has an appropriately flaky quality. Drew Barrymore and Julia
Roberts play the key women on the official and unofficial side respectively of
Barris’ life.

The
film’s most appealing notion is that this double life makes a fiendish sense.
It posits that the chaperoned trips taken by the winners on The Dating Game provided cover for
Barris to travel on his murderous missions (there’s a nice shot of a
contestant’s crestfallen expression as she learns of her prize – an
all-expenses paid trip to…West Berlin). More fundamentally, it draws a link
between the cultural impact of mass-audience TV and the CIA’s political
“engineering.” Some Barris shows, with their prize washer dryers and
refrigerators, fetishize the consumerist side of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness; others, like The Gong Show,
sacrifice self-respect and decorum for the sake of the shortest term buzz.

You can
imagine it as a kind of two-pronged attack – a subtle calibration to herd the
audience right where someone (Nixon?) wanted them. Their trashiness seemed even
at the time to define new cultural territory; now – in an age where we’re
accustomed to assuming that all trash might
have a subtext – it seems in some ways prophetic. Barris might have been more
significant than he knew (maybe his importance depended on him not knowing), and wouldn’t it round it
all outnicely, to have a hand in
killing off designated enemies of the state?

Or maybe
he’s just a buffoon and a liar.

Clooney’s career

Although
Clooney’s appeared now in several big box office hits (The Perfect Storm, Ocean’s Eleven), I’m not sure he’s yet shaken
off the sense of a TV actor who got lucky. He’s unquestionably charismatic, but
extremely low-key about it – he speaks in a quiet, even tone; using his softly
piercing eyes for modulation. Recently he’s seemed ambivalent about his career:
he’s been quoted as saying he’s not that interested in the big multi-million
paydays, and intends to make more of the films he likes. He’s working on his
second Coen Brothers film after already making three with Steven Soderbergh.
Along with Three Kings, these choices
show a genuine adventurousness and artistic integrity, but it’s doubtful that
those attributes have done much to shape his image yet.

Confessions, consequently, is a crazy piece of material,
with a surprisingly even tone. Clooney surrounds the piece in shadow and
discreet angles. He gets more flashy here and there, but stays far away from
the constant pyrotechnics of something like Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas (a direction in which this kind of material could
easily have gone, I think). Overall, it’s an effective, insinuating style,
deftly bringing out the material’s ambiguities and possibilities.

Everyone
always says in interviews what a nice guy Clooney is, and accordingly he
enticed half the cast of his last movie Ocean’s
Eleven to help him out here. Roberts plays a minor supporting role and Matt
Damon and Brad Pitt take on blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos as contestants on
The Dating Game. The use of Damon and
Pitt is interesting; they stand there as losers while the woman on the other
side of the screen gets seduced by the silver tongue of the third contestant
who, of course, isn’t in the same league as a looker. It’s a good visual joke,
but depends entirely on us stepping outside the movie to acknowledge the
presence of the two star actors. As a tip-off not to get too wrapped up in
this, it confirms Clooney’s skepticism, and his confidence.

There’s no business…

Clooney
also breaks up the action through brief interviews with Barris’ contemporaries
– none of whom, of course, has anything to say on the central question of
whether any of this stuff could possibly be true: they serve only to confirm
the least contentious stuff about the man. I’m unsure whether this is an
explicit parody of the “witnesses” in a movie like Reds.

There’s a
hilarious scene where Robert John Burke, as an FCC guy, gives a group of
contestants a pre-taping lecture on network standards and practices,
identifying lasciviousness with un-Americanness and referring to “sick,
subversive remarks.” It’s patently absurd, and yet not so far removed from some
cultural debates that still recur nowadays. I think the movie could have
profited from spending more time in that territory. As it is, it gets bogged
down in the spy stuff, becoming increasingly repetitive and murky as it goes on
(as though Clooney were aiming to evoke, of all things, the last passage of Apocalypse Now).

In the
end though, he finishes on a recording of Rosemary Clooney (his aunt) in an
unapologetically upbeat version of There’s
No Business Like Show Business. I don’t think the implications of the
choice run that deep, but they might. That uncertainty partly reflects the film’s
own confusion, but also its genuine success in sowing ambiguity and
dislocation. Which, for a movie about Chuck Barris, may be as great an artistic
payoff as anyone could ever have expected.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).